Viva Cohen, a self-proclaimed "insecure teenage Jew," is the starstruck heroine of Forrest's zippy, pop-conscious debut. When Viva's mother decides to live a life of New Age ashram hopping, Viva is raised by Manny, her gay uncle in a North London flat coated with posters of Elizabeth Taylor. With Manny as her father figure, "Liz" as her matriarch, and her two best friends, Ray, a 33-year-old rock star, and Treena, a feckless bombshell, Viva, at 17, knits up her life with celluloid threads. She dresses up as Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, and she's both lighthearted and cynical about love. The novel is a love story of sorts, but the objects of Viva's affection are in a constant state of teenage flux. In London, it's Ray, who's more big brother than romantic interest; in Edinburgh, it's Ray's opening act, Drew, an anorexic self-mutilator who shares Viva's love for Marilyn Monroe; and in Las Vegas it's Dillon, a misunderstood tweenie pop heartthrob. Eventually, she and Treena achieve their ambition of staying at the Chateau Marmont in L.A., but disillusion follows. Unlike the unnamed protagonist of contemporary Rebecca Ray's Pure (a fellow Brit, Forrest, at 22, is just two years older than Ray), Viva remains refreshingly chaste. Losing her virginity, Viva believes, is simply too complicated without the correct camera angle or the prospect of a second take. Her would-be silver screen life is as exasperating as it is self-aware. Read more »
Missy didn’t mean to cut so deep. But after the party where she was humiliated in front of practically everyone in school, who could blame her for wanting some comfort? Sure, most people don’t find comfort in the touch of a razor blade, but Missy always was . . . different. That’s why she was chosen to become one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War. Now Missy wields a new kind of blade—a big, brutal sword that can cut down anyone and anything in her path. But it’s with this weapon in her hand that Missy learns something that could help her triumph over her own pain: control. A unique approach to the topic of self-mutilation, Rage is the story of a young woman who discovers her own power and refuses to be defeated by the world.
19-year-old Charity Graff engages in self-harm. More specifically she cuts herself to numb emotions. In a series of raw journal entries, the confused teenager writes to her estranged father, filling him in on what's happened in her life since he left her nearly 18 years ago. Throughout the course of her letter writing, Charity chronicles her penchant for cutting, a serious struggle with depression and her inability to vocally express her feelings.
When 15-year-old nobody James gets accepted to a boarding school for gifted kids, he has a rare chance to completely reinvent himself. He dyes his hair purple and wows his new friends with tales of street fighting and carjacking, which helps attract the attention of girls—admiring looks from gothy Jess and scowls from perfect-girl Ellie—for the first time ever. Somewhere in the mix, he also starts cutting himself, chugging cough syrup, and engaging in increasingly reckless behavior, more out of boredom rather than any deep-seated psychological trauma. Just in case readers need things further spelled out, he also starts having vivid dreams of conquering demons. This isn't quite a teen problem novel, but it walks a similarly fine line: serious issues, taken too heavily, risk melodrama or didacticism. To the end, tactical strikes of humor and perceptive insights (not cutting feels “like tasting water”) keep this investigation of teen identity issues aloft, and the unusual focus on a male cutter helps set it apart.
Following King's triumphant return to the world of gory horror in Cell, the bestselling author proves he's still the master of supernatural suspense in this minimally bloody but disturbing and sorrowful love story set in rural Maine. Lisey's husband, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Scott Landon, has been dead for two years at the book's start, but his presence is felt on every page. Lisey hears him so often in her head that when her catatonic sister, Amanda, begins speaking to her with Scott's voice, she finds it not so much unbelievable as inevitable. Soon she's following a trail of clues that lead her to Scott's horrifying childhood and the eerie world called Boo'ya Moon, all while trying to help Amanda and avoid a murderous stalker. Both a metaphor for coming to terms with grief and a self-referencing parable of the writer's craft, this novel answers the question King posed 25 years ago in his tale "The Reach": yes, the dead do love.
